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Saturday, December 09, 2006

Cookies to get us through the baking bonanza...

It is just about crunch time around here - this next week might be a little slower as I will be quite busy finishing up all of the baked goods we are making as gifts so we can get them out in time. I've been getting doughs into the freezer and getting the last of the ingredient lists pinned down - we may top our usage of butter and chocolate from last year... oh my! As always, a lot of the stuff we will end up making will be items that need to be done last minute to ensure freshness... who needs sleep right?

Since I won't have much time to make snacks for us, I threw together some cookies today so we can have something in the freezer just for us.

The dough for these Honey-Roasted Chunky Peanut Butter Cookies was a breeze to make and just a bit different than your ordinary peanut butter cookies. Since the dough is a little sticky, I used a cookie scoop to portion it out - but you could just use a tablespoon and a little bit of flour to roll them into balls. Honey is used for sweetness and gives the dough a bit different texture - we found the golden baked cookies to have a slight crispness to the outside with the tender insides being more soft with a slight chew. These were not hard, crumbly or sandy as some peanut butter cookies are. To show there are bits of chopped peanuts in the cookies, I pressed in half of a peanut on the top of each cookie. If you don't want to bother with the more traditional criss-cross pattern on top, just use the bottom of a glass or some wet fingertips to flatten the cookies out a bit before baking.

Blogger has finally given me the option to switch to the new beta version - has anyone had much luck with the transition or any tips to share? Between our daily updates and recipes we currently have over 1170 posts, I don't have much time to fiddle if issues come up!

9 comments:

I've been on beta for about a month now and love it. I haven't had any problems so far. I love how you can customize your blog and move things around a bit more. I need to start categorizing my recipes like you do. That will be my next task.

I have been on the beta version for a little over a month. I had a few problems with posts being lost. That seems to have subsided now. I know that there are always kinks to work out, of course, I don't have nearly the amount of posts that you do.

I just got the option to switch over too, Joe. I decided to give it a try, but it wouldn't let me. Turns out that if you're a member of Food Blog S'Cool, you won't be able to switch over until they do. Did you join that group? There is a post (or two) on FBS, if you want to read more about it.

Apparently there is also a choice for click and drag templates and HTML. I haven't read about it, but it sounds like perhaps you should choose the HTML templates if you still want to be able to do a lot of tweaking.

I'm probably going to wait until FBS switches over so that I don't have to "unjoin" there. This will also give me time to read about the new version and find out more about the template options. I definitely want the capability to tweak!

It makes me nervous to switch! But I am looking forward to the labels......

Beta is more user-friendly, but there's a problem with the syndication, at least for some. The rss feed (or something, I'm no expert you see) changes and not every blog list can get the posts...hope that helps?

Joe, you've done so much customizing to your template, with all the feed signups, and those huge sidebars of links... I'd proceed with caution. Creating new links will be easier in the future on beta, but they sure didn't make it obvious how to carry over existing ones. I think you're right to wait until you're less pressed for time.